So Israel ran into Rome and the rest is history, in retrospect all revelation,
God fulfilling his promise to Moses that He'd be seen from behind but,
as Newton put it, we're still children on the shore throwing stones in
the water, the great ocean of truth undiscovered before us. Upon
what particulars was such foresight based? God's in the details and
we yearn, but knowledge of spirit, of the agency of the thing, seems likely
to be a long accumulation. We have forever so we'd take it if nothing
more could be done, but a really good imitation of a matterclad spirit
would have what passed, some faculty standing in, for direct apprehension
of the spirit, a method, maybe, a trick of the light, a sixth sense be
it ever so humble of things as they are. Intuition's appearance out
of the material mix is heartening, but it's not up to the endless ambiguity,
nothing like the realtime feline finesse for which the condition calls.
Among the consequences, however, of the definitional shift is a fieldtheory
on a pinhead, a matrix which implodes the database (no fooling) and becomes
preconscious on recognition, second nature.

Perception, first: "reality" (said Nabokov, should always be in
quotes), if the universe is the outer half of the human condition, lies
in the interface. Einstein likened it to a closed watch, on which
we can observe the effects of the mechanism, but cannot hope to see the
thing itself, so we invent hypothetical works and create paradigms to account
for our observations, to correlate them and point to new sources of information.
The process cannot be adequately described as an accumulation of observation
and subsequent fabrication of a conceptual structure. It is, in fact,
the concepts which come first, and account for observation further, enabling
it. Our wealth of empirical concepts, selfevident (now) groupings
of things has been gathered painstakingly over the centuries and if we
picture ourselves going back through time and watching one concept after
another disappear, what happens each time is that the world is suddenly
blinded to something we see as obvious. If at any of these points
we stop and go forward, watching closely, we see an individual intuition
of an affinity (which, pointed out, anyone can see and soon everyone does)
between things not yet grouped thus. This deblinding illustrates
the primacy of concept over (preceding, implying) observation: you
don't know what to look for until you know what to look for, and once you
know what to look for, you see it. In this special case of human
development, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

You see what you look for: the big question is what paradigms
do and how, their givenness/idiosyncrasy. Are they truths discovered
or, as Einstein put it, "free creations of the human mind?" Science
has worked out the rule of adequacy, most notably in the relationship between
Newton and Einstein, whose systems account for normal conditions equally
well from diametric assumptions, but predict opposite behavior in extremity.
If we strapped the two men in twin rockets and accelerated them side by
side to lightspeed, as they neared the ultimate velocity the manifold would
change into something other than it had appeared to be and Einstein would
expect this, but not Newton. As his assumptions went slowly out of
phase with fact, Newton wouldn't notice because the changes he couldn't
predict (lengthshrink, massgrow, timeslow) would happen uniformly throughout
the ship. As his theory gave increasingly bad advice, became detrimental
to his welfare, it would still seem to work and he'd destroy himself all
unwittingly. Einstein could point this out, but even as it happened
a warning would strike Newton as lunacy. Reality simply does not
disavow paradigms.

Under normal conditions, then, contrary presuppositions are equally
plausible, predict identical behavior so there's no testing them but in
crisis, where most fail miserably but, for those holding them, still ring
true. Reality accommodates an apparently inexhaustible variety of
explanations, assumptions about its nature which give meaning to the material
and which all seem to work, to give adherents the conviction that they're
continually validated. Even when a paradigm's deficiencies are exposed
so badly (Jonestown, the Third Reich; within tighter parameters, Watergate
was the same story) that a step beyond its boundary or a moment past its
end produces a nearly unshakeable incredulity that a group could thus be
taken in, the vast majority never think of jumping ship, emigrating even
internally. All but infinitely acquiescent, the manifold drives a
hard bargain in the end and this is the limit on evil God guaranteed Job:
"Thus far."